'Batman' revisited: 'Batman Forever' and 'Batman & Robin'

To celebrate the arrival of The Dark Knight Rises on Friday (July 20), Digital Spy is taking you through six of the Dark Knight's previous cinematic outings.

Under the stewardship of three very different directors - Tim Burton, Joel Schumacher, and Christopher Nolan - the Batman of the big screen has had vastly different guises. Some are beguiling, some are baffling - and some have nipples on them.

Today we look back at the difficult middle portion of the franchise: Joel Schumacher's Batman Forever and Batman and Robin.

Batman Forever (1995)Despite the financial success of the uncompromisingly weird Batman Returns, studio heads at Warner Bros were convinced that the franchise was moving too far away from its commercial potential.

As a result, out went screenwriter Daniel Waters and director Tim Burton (although he stayed on as producer), and in came Akiva Goldsman and Joel Schumacher.

Out went the murky claustrophobia of Burton's Gotham City, in came an eye-frazzling onslaught of day-glo costumes and neon sets. Out went Michael Keaton's polonecks, in came Val Kilmer's rubber nipples.

It's hard to believe this film came just two years after Batman Returns, as it doesn't even feel as if it's from the same planet, let alone the same Hollywood era.

It's a film I have a personal blind spot for as I first saw it when I was 9 years old, which is exactly the right age to enjoy it to its full potential. But many years later there's still things to enjoy here.

The production design is undeniably impressive, Jim Carrey steals the film with a memorably unhinged performance as the Riddler, and Val Kilmer is an underrated Batman - while he doesn't have much charisma as Bruce, he does have a great chin/voice combo for Bats, which counts for a lot.

While the film overall is about as subtle as a Skittles enema, it's rarely less than watchable, building to a nice climax with some fun action sequences.

The script is diabolical, though - poor Nicole Kidman is forced to read mind-numbing dialog as one of the most one-dimensional characters in the series, and the attempts to delve into Bruce's psyche are embarrassing.

Tommy Lee Jones in uncharacteristically poor as Two-Face, playing way over the top for the character - even considering the movie he's in. The less said about Chris O'Donnell's Robin, the better.

Batman Forever is something of a misfire, then, but not the total dud that many would lead you to believe. If it's a fully-fledged Bat-disaster you were after, however, you didn't have to wait long to get your wish.

Batman and Robin (1997)"The night is always darkest before the dawn," says Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight, and how true that statement rings as we come to the last of the pre-Nolan Batman films, the infamous Batman & Robin.

Surely - surely - it can't still be as bad as its reputation, after all these years? Surely Father Time has soothed its terrible impact and made it more palatable after 15 years of time and space to digest and reflect?

Nah. It's still apocalyptically awful, a nigh-on unwatchable kitsch-fest that stinks from the very first frame until it lumbers to a close an interminable two hours later, and is almost admirable in its inability to get a single thing right during that running time.

The script is a contender for the very worst ever, a litany of nonsensical, desperately unfunny one-liners ("What killed the dinosaurs? The Ice Age!"), shoehorned into a plot that doesn't make sense, with characters that act in ways that bear no likeness to either their comic book origins or any human beings in history.

The performances are just as bad - Arnie's Mr Freeze is obviously head-bashingly bad, but Alicia Silverstone (as a totally unneccessary Batgirl), Chris O'Donnell, George Clooney, and particularly Uma Thurman all give it their best shot to out-awful him, as they painfully grunt their way through their moronic lines, bored and with emphasis in all the wrong places.

In fairness, Clooney does deserve some sort of award for maintaining the most consistently constipated expression of any actor in any film.

Schumacher has shouldered most of the blame for this abomination, and rightly so - he fails to instil even the faintest hint of heart, a soul, or a brain into a single moment - the teased peril of Alfred is laughably overwrought and ham-fisted - and his obsession with close-ups of the Bat-buns (Bat-tocks?) is outright creepy.

There are only two groups of people who have watched Batman & Robin in the past ten years - the people who are compiling YouTube super-cuts of its many terrible moments, and the people writing Batman movie retrospectives.

Everyone else - as you were. Nothing to see here.

Unlikely as it seems, there was one good thing about Batman & Robin - it was so egregiously bad, that it forced not only the Batman franchise, but also Warner Bros and the whole industry to abandon the idea of the campy comic book movie almost for good, so tarnished was the genre by the odour of Schumacher's efforts.

When producing 2001's X-Men, the studios took a different tack - staying much closer to comic-book source material, telling a superhero story in a (relatively) adult context, and giving the film to an interesting director with an independent background.

That film's success, followed by the even bigger success of the similarly produced Spider-Man in 2002, led Warner Bros to ask the question: would the same template work if applied to the Batman franchise? They gambled yes, and handed the keys to the Batmobile over to a young, largely unknown British director...

Check back tomorrow (July 18) for our final look-back at the Batman series, as we examine Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.